[Lab Seminar] Neural heterogeneity promotes robust learning

Nov 1, 2021

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26022-3.pdf

Neural heterogeneity promotes robust learning

Nicolas Perez-Nieves 1✉, Vincent C. H. Leung 1

, Pier Luigi Dragotti1 & Dan F. M. Goodman 1✉

The brain is a hugely diverse, heterogeneous structure. Whether or not heterogeneity at the

neural level plays a functional role remains unclear, and has been relatively little explored in

models which are often highly homogeneous. We compared the performance of spiking

neural networks trained to carry out tasks of real-world difficulty, with varying degrees of

heterogeneity, and found that heterogeneity substantially improved task performance.

Learning with heterogeneity was more stable and robust, particularly for tasks with a rich

temporal structure. In addition, the distribution of neuronal parameters in the trained networks is similar to those observed experimentally. We suggest that the heterogeneity

observed in the brain may be more than just the byproduct of noisy processes, but rather may

serve an active and important role in allowing animals to learn in changing environments.

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